Scrolling lag on a system with a Nvidia GPU
Hey, after using chrome for a couple of years, i decided to give Firefox a go and while it has been really snappy so far, there's an issue where scrolling and all animations run at ~80fps tops on my 144hz 1440p monitor. Due to a mismatch in frame time, no animation looks smooth at this frame rate on my display unfortunately. This behavior is exaggerated when running firefox maximized, as the frame rate is noticeably higher when running on a smaller window.
I've had a similar issue in the past on an older Nvidia GPU, where the driver wasn't upping the GPU clock automatically on firefox, so i decided to force max clocks on the GPU yet i didn't notice a performane difference this time. I've also tried running running firefox in troubleshooting mode and have tried firefox nightly with no extensions, to no avail in both cases. Hardware acceleration is enabled on my system and nothing on about:support would indicate it's opting for software rendering instead, so I'm unsure as to how to go on troubleshooting this issue.
The GPU is a Geforce 1660 Super on a Ryzen 5 3600 powered system, so i guess it should be able to do smooth hardware acceleration as it (mostly) does on chrome and electron powered apps.
All Replies (6)
Seems like bug1538469 to me. Would you please take a look at the bug report and confirm?
Kiki said
Seems like bug1538469 to me. Would you please take a look at the bug report and confirm?
Doesn't seem like it is. I have had the issue described in this report in the past, where the gpu took a long time to up it's clocks when scrolling on firefox and that caused some lag for the first few seconds. This time however the frame rate is steadily lower that the refresh rate of the monitor, by how much depends on the size of the window and the elements present on the webpage.
GPU usage is in the 30% range at minimum clocks usually, i have tried forcing peak clocks however in Nvidia's Control panel to no avail.
Where are the examples of the issue so that we can try to replicate the issue?
jonzn4SUSE said
Where are the examples of the issue so that we can try to replicate the issue?
Running firefox on a system with a NVidia GPU and a high refresh rate 1440p+ screen may trigger the issue. The frame rate is consistently low across all websites and even the browser's own pages (settings etc), one of the slowest ones is reddit.com
I took a look today, and it appears that Firefox is using an enormous pixmap that exceeds the GPU's maximum rendering dimensions, causing software fallbacks. While we will attempt to make it as fast as possible, performance would be greatly improved if Firefox would render using surfaces that fit within the maximum renderable dimensions.
Yep, a using software rendering fallback on a system with a recent gpu sounds like it would cause this kinda performance issues alright. Hope to see a fix in a future version of firefox, cuz I love the ui and I'd wanna make the switch from chrome.
Still impressive tho, anything chromium based used to be a slideshow without hw acceleration lmao.